Chapter Six

Before I would tell Greg anything else about the L.B., I insisted that we try to contact my brother. I had to know if he was still alive… I really would like to have some family members left in this world, and other then an uncle on my dad’s side that I’ve never met, Rocko’s all I got left. It turns out that Rocko and Drac had gotten into an argument about me, something about marriage arrangements, Rocko got pissed and stormed out. He was currently driving as fast as he could back here from Niagara Falls, hey when you look twenty what casino is going to deny you the right to blow your money?

“Greg this is going to sound weird but I have my reasons, we need to take some pictures before his body disintegrates. I need them to test my theory, I could be wrong and this could have nothing to do with the Legion, but I need the pictures to prove it.”

“Alright Rae, do you even have a camera here?” He asked with a sigh.

“I have everything in the truck, wait here I’ll be back…” Without waiting for him to answer me, I sprinted back to my father’s pick-up and opened the ‘Truck-mate’ (A black storage box type thing attached to the truck bed closest to the cab). I grabbed my digital camera and a large jar type creation of mine for the ashes once they deteriorated. Then I booked it back to the flag pole. “Here… hold… this.” I told Greg out of breath, as I handed him the Jar. “I’ll take… the pics… since I… know what I’m… looking for.”

“OK then, fire away.”

It took me ten minutes to get all the picture’s I needed, it’s amazing how well the Vampyre’s body is preserved after it takes a hit from the sun. It’s a forensic scientists dream; every slice that they took out of my uncle was perfectly preserved. They even stabbed him through the heart, and not with the usual silver daggers that normal hunters love so much. No, because if they had he would have been dust long before the sun had a chance at him. What a horrible way to go, slowly burning alive as the sun kisses the morning sky… and the servants inside, they must have torched the place. Talk about using their superstitions against them.

“Raven? What happened?” Rocko had just arrived on scene, “What’d they do to him?” Rocko had a better relationship with our uncle then I did, or at least a more civil relationship.

“Rocko can we talk about this later? I’m still trying to figure out who did this.” Just as I took the last picture my Uncle Drac’s body collapsed in on its self. “Greg, pass me the Jar.” I hit a small black button on the lid and as if by magick, when I held the jar pointed at my uncle’s remaining ashes, they were sucked inside. After I hit the button again there was the sound of vacuum sealing out the air and the jar fell silent. “This is going to be a little hard to explain…”

“What is? How he died?” Rocko asked getting pissed.

“No, that’ll be easy. Exposure to the sun killed him.” I told my brother cradling the jar.

“Then what?” Greg asked confused.

“How in the last three months two of my legal Guardians have died, and that both have been cremated. The police were suspicious enough after dad died and I cremated him before I told anybody he was dead. How likely are they to believe that I didn’t kill Drac either?” I sighed, “Well Finningan’s got his work cut out for him this time that’s for sure.”

“Who’s Finningan?” Greg asked me curiously.

“My lawyer. A demon by the name of Finningan Morelli. Hopefully he can find a Judge who knows a little something about the supernatural. They are so hard to come by these days.”

“Rae I know you have suspicions about who did this…” My brother added angrily.

“Rock I think, now I’m not positive hence the camera, but it might have been the Legion of Blood.”

“The Legion? Why would they kill Uncle Drac? He’s not even on their hit list…”

“Who is this Legion?”

“Oh right sorry Greg. The Legion of Blood is a group of twenty or so Silver Bloods…”

“Like you?” He asked as the three of us started back to our vehicles.

“No… well yes and no. The only similarity between the Legion and I is our silver blood.” He was even more confused then before so Rocko took over the explanation.

“The Legion are a group of Silver Bloods, but they’re seriously twisted. See they only hunt Vampyres, but what they do to them is seriously messed up. They don’t just kill the Vampyre, they torture them. Sometimes for days on end before they leave them to bake in the sun. One time they actually forced a Vampyre to kill his entire family before they left him at the Sun’s mercy.” Rocko said darkly, “We’ve run into them a few times over the years. They made dad’s s**t list more then a few times, stealing his targets right from under his radar. But then a few years ago they found out that Rae’s a Silver Blood too.”

“So?”

“So they approached my father for permission to take me into their happy little family of psychopaths. My father almost shot the idiot that they sent. They wouldn’t take no for an answer though and kept on hounding us.”

“Dad went as far as to get a Warlock friend of his to put protective spells around Rae in attempts to get them to leave her alone. See the Legion believe that every Silver Blood has to be a member. No exceptions. And until we came along, they’ve never had a problem with recruiting. Most people are scared shitless of them.”

“They went as far as to try to kidnap me from my dormitory room at school. Luckily for me, my Wiccan roommate woke up and screamed bloody murder. She threw a large Quartz stone at the idiot and he fell from the window. They only reason I know that it was a Legion member was that as he fell from the window his sleeve caught on the pane and tore. What idiot gets the LEGION OF BLOOD monogrammed on his sleeve?”

“We haven’t heard from them in about eight months, we thought they’d finally given up. What makes you think that it was the Legion Rae?”

“Well who ever did this torched the castle, and then took the time to stop the tapestries from burning. That and they drained his blood before chaining him up. I could be wrong but this seems like their M.O. Remember the massacre of St. Catherin’s Cathedral a few years back? Supernaturalist Journal blamed it on Vampyres, but St. Catherin’s is a Vampyre Church. They wouldn’t have been so brutal if it had been Vampyres. Even dad said that no hunter would have gone to such extremes, they found bunsion burners surrounding the entire Cathedral, no Vampyre would have dared leave the church with the threat of their souls being lost forever.” I told them as we reached Rocko’s van,

“God I should have been here, I could have done something…” Rocko moaned in dismay.

“Rocko they would have fried you just like they did everyone else. As Bec always says, every thing happens for a reason.” I told him with a sigh, I was of course referring to my school roommate Katherine, a nickname her Grandmother gave her at birth . “We need to get back to my house; I need to analyze these pictures. If I see the connection then it was the Legion, if not we’ve got bigger problems.”

“What do you mean?” Greg asked.

“She means if it wasn’t the Legion then who else do you know that is this twisted? At least with the Legion we have some idea of what we’re dealing with, we know what they’re capable of…”